In 2011 when Samsung was faced with a Second Request production for the sale of its hard drive division to Seagate Technologies, we were approached with a problem by our client, Paul Hastings, their counsel.

The regulators had requested English translations of millions of documents to be produced for their review. Samsung facing the daunting task of human translating these documents and the time and money it would take to accomplish it were wondering if an efficient machine translation solution would allow them to produce these documents.

After reviewing their requirements and knowing that convincing the regulator to accept less efficient translations would be challenging, we set out to train our translation engines with existing human translated reference documents from within their document corpus and a proof of concept stage that would at first convince our client and secondly allow them to build a defensible process to convince the regulators to accept them.

After approximately 4 weeks of training utilizing a unique and interactive voting mechanism, the translated documents were so good that in some cases our client could not tell the difference between an English document that originated from Korean via MT and its human translated counterpart. We were not naive in thinking that we can get this kind of result throughout the document collection, although it was enough to convince everyone that we had come up with an Aha moment.

Naturally this step was one of 7-8 different ones we took to enhance the quality of the translations, although as more training occurred the better the quality of the output. This was the first time this regulator accepted machine translated documents as a substitute for human translated ones.

As a result Samsung was able to conclude the sale in about 5 months (vs. 1-2 years with human translations) with a savings, by our guesstimate and based on human translation pricing at the time of about $25-35 million.

After the conclusion of the sale, Paul Hastings Partners and Associates were presented with the “Matter of the Year” award by Global Competition Review, the world’s leading Antitrust and Competition Law Journal.

At the completion of this matter, we released the first version of our EMT (Enhanced Machine Translation) product and over the next 5 years have enhanced the quality of the translations we produce.